Gatsby

Fitzgerald was the Keats of early twentieth century prose writers: everything he said, he said more beautifully than anyone else could.  

A first reading of The Great Gatsby is like a first visit to Europe: you're so anxious to see everything that you rush ahead, missing countless wonders along the way.  Fitzgerald's narrative style is so fluid you're carried along effortlessly, but the way he describes things is relentlessly brilliant.  You do yourself a favor by slowing down and enjoying the ride.

Daisy's voice, for instance, "was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again."

Tom was "one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax."  When dinner was announced, Tom took Nick's arm and "compelled" him from the room "as though he were moving a checker to another square."  I love that it's "checker" and not "chess piece," an oblique comment on Tom's intellect.

And all of that is in chapter 1.  It is also at the outset that two important questions in the novel are introduced.

  1. How reliable a narrator is Nick Carraway?  He begins his story telling us something about himself, that he makes an effort to "reserve all judgements."  This serves as a disclaimer for the narrative to follow, in some ways.  It reminds me of Christopher Isherwood at the beginning of his "Goodbye to Berlin," when he says, "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."  In a sense, I think Nick is saying, "I am a camera."  Telling his story sometimes means giving some characters more of a hearing than most rational people normally would.  Nick allows himself to be manipulated and keeps the camera rolling as events sometimes become uncomfortable, and it is often in those situations that characters most honestly reveal themselves. But for all of his reserve, Nick makes plenty of judgements.  He tells us from the beginning exactly how he feels about Gatsby, that Gatsby "turned out alright at the end," that in contrast to all the distaste Nick came to feel for the society he briefly moved through in west egg, that "only Gatsby.. was exempt."  Are we obliged to share Nick's opinion? We have only Nick's point of view to rely on for the basic facts of the novel, but how much weight do we give to Nick's feelings about things and people, especially Gatsby himself?  Which leads us directly to..
  2. What should we make of Gatsby?  He is charming and successful, but maudlin and ridiculous.  He has a remarkable innocence, and this may ultimately be his defining characteristic.  But what criteria do we use to judge this amazing character?

These two issues are obviously very interweaved.  There is a third question raised in my mind in the first chapter, though maybe not as crucial as these two, and that is what to make of this line: "life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all."            





 

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